5 easy flower arrangement ideas with dahlias

The best thing about having a dahlia garden is having lots and lots of flowers to play with. I like to fill jugs, bottles and vases with beautiful flowers from the garden. A flower arrangement doesn’t have to be difficult, even a few blooms in a small vase can brighten up the kitchen table. Here are more than 5 easy flower arrangement ideas with dahlias, with different flower and foliage combinations.

I hope you have been enjoying September. Autumn colours are everywhere, leaves are starting to fall and my dahlia garden is coming to an end. Last year, I had blooms well into October. But this year, September has been wet and cold and dahlias don’t like that. Still, I really enjoyed my dahlia garden. I didn’t have as many flowers as other years, but I did have enough dahlias to play with.

I am by no means a florist or floral designer but I do love to create arrangements. In this blog post, I like to share some easy flower arrangement ideas with dahlias. Again, I am not a professional but I hope to give you some ideas about flower and foliage combinations. I had fun creating these arrangements, and I hope to encourage you to create your own.

1. Small posy in white and green

Let’s begin with a small, and therefore really easy flower arrangement with dahlias. Just a few flowers in a small vase make a sweet little posy.

For this arrangement, I used a small vintage vase. It’s from the 1950s and was produced by the Sphinx factory in Maastricht. The colour is a beautiful mint green with some brown spots, like blackbird eggs.  It looks great with pink flowers but for this arrangement, I kept it clean and simple. I used two small stems of Hydrangea Annabelle as base flowers. The flowers of hydrangea will slowly dry in the vase and won’t wilt. You can use them again in other arrangements.

I added dahlias Twyning’s White Chocolate and Platinum Blonde, a Japanese anemone, Achillea millefolium (yarrow), and a few branches.

2. Arrangement featuring ‘Labyrinth’

In this second arrangement, you can see a few of my new dahlias; Labyrinth, Waltzing Mathilda and Linda’s Baby, along with trusted favourites Burlesca and Cornel.

Dahlia Labyrinth has quickly become a favourite. It is stunningly beautiful with wavy petals in peach and raspberry. At the beginning of the season, stems were very short and the flowers were almost hidden among the leaves of the bushy plants. But flowers don’t always need to have long stems to be useful.

Along with the flowers, I used some branches, a stem of Persicaria and a stem of Heuchera.

Heuchera is a plant grown primarily for its beautiful foliage. The attractive leaves come in so many colours. I only have one variety in the garden, with dark purple leaves, but I should grow more. The flowers aren’t show stoppers but I think they are lovely and useful for arrangements.

For this bouquet, I used another one of my vintage vases, a favourite. It was produced by Mosa Maastricht.

3. Pink peach and coral florals

A few months ago I wrote a book review about Floret Farm’s Cut Flower Garden and I still love to sit down and flip through it for inspiration. The floral designs in the book are absolutely gorgeous but often made with so many types of flowers, they seem impossible to recreate at home.

In my garden, I grow 22 varieties of dahlias. When the dahlia garden is at its peak, I can use as many as I want. But dahlias on their own can be a little stiff. The florists I admire, approach the art of floral design in a natural, loose and truly beautiful way.

When creating garden style arrangements, foliage is just as important as flowers. It’s not just about including some green. Including more than one type of greenery creates a variety of colours and textures. I am still learning and often fall back on the same ingredients namely fern leaves and ivy. I love ivy, covering a wall or fence with glossy, dark green leaves. We have plenty of ivy in the garden. The same goes for ferns.

For this bouquet, I chose dahlias in a limited colour palette, pink, peach, raspberry, with green as a neutral. The hydrangea flowers, fresh and white in high summer, are lime green at the moment. A complementary colour to pink.

To give you an idea, here is a list of the ingredients of this bouquet:

• 1 stem of dahlia Bellelaine
• 6 stems of dahlia Preference
• 6 stems of dahlia Burlesca
• 3 stems of dahlia Linda’s Baby
• 3  stems of Hydrangea Annabelle
• 2 stems of Heuchera
• 1 stem of Lady’s Mantle
• 1 stem of Persicaria
• 1 stem of Astilbe
• 1 branch of ivy
• 1 branch of wisteria
• a fern leaf

4. Black Jack, black jug

Dahlia Black Jack is one of my favourite dahlias. It’s one of the darkest varieties available, with velvety, deep red blooms. It’s doing extremely well this year. The plants are tall and bushy and even though Black Jack doesn’t produce masses of flowers (bigger flowers often means fewer flowers), I have had plenty blooms from it. The flowers are blackish-red and velvety on tall, strong stems that make it an excellent cut flower.

In the vase are two heads of hydrangea Limelight, a very strong hydrangea that fades to pink. I added dahlias Preference, Platinum Blonde and Cafe au Lait. Along with the flowers, I reused the Eupatorium rugosum Chocolate and added some grasses.

5. Colourful Autumn arrangement

I made this arrangement in October with the last dahlias of the season, rosehips, ferns and beautiful Virginia creeper. So much colour, don’t you just love autumn?

The dahlias in this arrangement are Peaches n’ Cream, Preference and Chat Noir. The oh-so-coveted Peaches n’ Cream! The blooms are 12-15 cm (4 inches), and the petals range from white to peach to orange. The flowers of Preference and Chat Noir are about the same size. Preference is a very useful dahlia, it goes well with just about everything. Chat Noir has super long and straight stems! Just like Black Jack it is a cactus dahlia with deep red blooms but much more productive.

Bonus 1. and 2.

If you still haven’t had enough easy flower arrangement ideas with dahlias, you might also like these older posts.

Dahlia arrangement featuring Café au Lait is a simple dahlia arrangement featuring the most popular dahlia of the moment, Café au Lait. With step-by-step instructions!

Autumnal Dahlia bouquet – fresh from the garden is a dahlia bouquet with that just-picked-from-the garden look.

Which one is your favourite?